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Saturday, December 1, 2012

War = sociopath breeding ground

On the topic of whether sociopaths are born or created, I just heard about the Japanese movie Battle Royale, in which a class of high school students is sent to an island to kill or be killed until there is one left standing. According to an imdb synopsis:

At the dawn of the new millennium, Japan is in a a state of near-collapse. Unemployment is at an all-time high, and violence among the nation's youth is spiraling out of control. With schoolchildren boycotting their classes and physically abusing their teachers, a beleaguered and near-defeated government decides to introduce a radical new measure: the Battle Royale Act Overseen by their former teacher Kitano and requiring that a randomly chosen school class is taken to a deserted island and forced to fight each other to the death, the Act dictates that only one pupil is allowed to survive the punishment. He or she will return, not as the victor, but as the ultimate proof of the lengths to which the government is prepared to go to curb the tide of juvenile disobedience.

Some of the kids immediately embrace the carnage, others reluctantly join in for self-preservation, others gather together into smaller groups that war with each other, still others seduce allies in, only to kill them in short order, and still others kill themselves in refusal to participate in the violence. The problems arise even in the groups of trusted souls as a greedy suspicion grasps them all. Those that don't succumb to this violent infidelity, surely risk falling victim to their external classmates' hunts.

When I first heard about the plot of the movie, I thought the island was meant to serve as an accelerant for natural selection. Of course if you are putting high school students on an island with weapons, the only thing you would be naturally selecting for is sociopaths. Under my revised-per-imdb understanding of the film, the island is not just naturally selecting out sociopaths, it is actually creating them out of normal empaths. Do I think this actually happens in war and other times of exigency? Yes, I do.

70 comments:

I'm under the impression that sociopathy is simply an adaptation. I don't think it's so much that we can not be or were never capable of empathy, it's just that somewhere along the road we made the choice not to, consciously or, more often, not.

We're missing a little bit of something, whether that's good or bad is subjective. You can crush that something with enough trauma to the programing of the "normal" brain to an extent, but that is simply the brain adapting to the acceptance as "correct", to the extent that it is a plausable event of reality, the things they have seen and done. People live with the bounds of reality between j-p, sociopaths can imagine a-z, because that is what could happen if this that the other thing and then this happened. It is knowing the boundaries of reality a little wider than most people think of, because they are. If it were to be laid out in enough detail to a logic program the "ifs" and "thens" would all add up to true. They may only be a .01% chance that they could all be met at the right time, but that's the thing about "if", it is, at that moment, or it is not. Until then its just enough if-thens in a narrowingly plausible time-span. There is cause for everything, a push must exist for a resting object to move, so are the laws of these physics.

What about the ones who refuse to participate in the carnage, but will defend themselves to the death if attacked. Trusting no one, distancing enough so that guile and subversion are useless weopons. Only head on combat by an overt aggressor will be engaged. Assuming that there are more than one of these " nobel warriors " left in the end, do they remain there uningaged. If forced to engage [ torture, ect ], then there is still an opponent aggressor. Does the warrior become traumatized [ PTSD ] and lose their sense of empathy, pity, and disgust. I think that they still feel empathy, love, ect,but live with sadness, disgust, and remorse. Most likely unable to form close attachments/relationships seated in extreme distrust. Maybe I'm missing some of the rules. I did not watch this one.

I think ME is right. Trauma and abuse can make you strong and perhaps stronger than opponents. Because it is the will to survive and the ingenuity one uses which will give you resources to keep your life. These could be defense mechanisms. Maybe a made sociopath has them built in.

Can warfare in the home can trigger it??? Is a question

But who knows.You want to know how to defeat devious abusers, you must think like them. Does that make you a part-time/war-time sociopath? I wouldn't think 2x about killing an opponent. I'm not a sociopath either.

And it takes a person strength to kill themselves. Someone with the knowledge they will be killed might just put the trigger to one's own head. I don't think that makes them a non-sociopath or a sociopath. This might disappoint the sociopath, but they still win, so prob not so much!

Now a narcissist might think their actions caused the suicide. This does not a sociopath make. I know this because I've had a narcissist ask me if they caused me to be sick.

Suicide is a preferred tool of sociopaths. Completely destroying their victim psychologically, to the point that the suffering is so great and their logic and rationale can no longer function cogently, the path kills and gets away with it.

Expect to dance. You never know what song is going to be played. Some songs are easier to dance to than others. Some are better dancers, and some can't dance at all. If the field gets to hot, you may end up dancing whether you want to or not. That is the silliness that is most sad. If you know that you have to dance to get to better places, then take lessons and keep practicimg! Dancining with wolves. Katunka!

I'm too adept for that. I might trip over myself every now and then, but I usually catch myself before I fall. It's always good for a laugh. Some of the funniest jokes are on ME. However, I usually sit out on the condescension 2 step, insecurity shuffle, and bad guy ballet. Boooooring!! I'll go grab a drink and wait to see if anyone wants to Tango. It's more fun! :)

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”

Also, ME is really hiding behind his sociopath status on this blog. I for one, am really curious about the man behind it. He gives us only stuff that falls into that category: Being a sociopath. Which in our minds he's made it to be a general thing. He falls into a category, everything he says does. His created personality on this blog is benign. One post he tried to offend people, maybe in a frustration overload but he was just as benign in that as well.

Also, I think M.E. is a male too, but does it really matter who he is in real life? He posts thoughts/ actions he took that are relevant to the site. Do you really care about the other everyday details? If he wanted you to know them, he'd share.

I don't think he really gives a damn about what we think of him, but rather wants to dispel some myths and encourage sharing of ideas. As well as providing a meeting place for people who generally wouldn't discuss these issues or seek help with their problems elsewhere.

Monica left her office and saw Literary Anon talking to Medusa. His face was close to hers and his eyes had that look: that look he just had with her. She went up to stand next to him and touch his arm. He shook it off and whispered, "Don't ever do that to be again, you whore"

Just as she was trying to regain her composure, he handed her a gift box. She tucked it in her purse and walked to her car. In the safety of her car, she opened it. There was a pair of panties with a tag--Pineapple Flavored Edible underwear. There was a handwritten note, in L.A's precise handwriting. "Wear these tomorrow, whore, or you will regret it."

Monica had a nice face and a weird face. The nice face stood at a comfortable distance from people. It did not have too much of an expression or too little. It gauged a middle ground, and went with it.

The weird face would leave a wet patch of water in her path or set booby traps with out of place furniture, to be tripped over, in the middle of the night. The weird face starved her or made her eat in a ravenous frenzy as if she needed to fatten up, before the famine which would signal the end of the world.

The weird face was a tough negotiator. You could throw meat at it, but it did not take shit scraps. Don't think you could buy it a Happy Meal and expect to be done. It wanted filet mignon. Trying to feed it took a balancing act of immense proportions. Once you offered up the sacrifice, you could never get it back, or at least without a herculean effort to the degree where you shrugged your shoulders and let it go.

As a sociopath and amateur writer myself, my own adaptation of this story would find the ultimate catharsis for the sociopath being the strategic suing for peace towards the last two or three groups left standing on the island. It should have been clear that the students should have worked together to overcome the adults forcing them to fight, rather than turned on themselves and each other. Sociopaths aren't necessarily self-destructive, after all. Far more likely to be self-destructive are empaths forced to take on alien traits, and I imagine that they would be grateful to surrender the responsibility for it to a real sociopath.

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Of course, my default is still to intuitively analyze every outcome and situation and achieve the best result, but it's more interesting to let people remain a variable and go in their own direction, rather than nudging them in the direction I prefer. Interacting with people WITHOUT trying to control them is a new paradigm for me.